5385: Response to Gomorrah Part II

I was drawn to the second to last paragraph of the text, which begins with "I was born in the land of the Comorra, in the territory with the most homicides in Europe, where savagery is interwoven with commerce, where nothing has value except what generates power." It's likely my training in creative nonfiction that interests me in this selection. We talked a lot in class about the way that he presents his research--sometimes 'showing his hand' and making it very apparent that he is writing this (with awful, poet-y phrases like "pancrease of silence," to quote Megan's favorite passage) but, frequently, presenting the material as a distanced observer to the point that I thought he wasn't working for them at all, just collecting information. In this section, I see all of the mechanics of writing. His heavy use of anaphora ("I was born...where...where...where...") was the first indicator. The reflection, too, seems highly fore-fronted, where he makes connections to the world at large, where the Comorra is only a small piece that reflects the rest of global society, where he explains everything that living in the Comorra is not before explaining what it is. Then, he ends on a rather foreboding note, claiming that "the only necessity if you want to consider yourself worthy of breathing" is knowing and understanding. I wonder at the necessity for this. Why end the section with this advert claiming of his text as something crafted for the audience?